Most companies throughout the United States use the services of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to communicate with their customers. These companies use the USPS to deliver monthly bills, monthly statements, annual reports for shareholders, catalogs for holiday shopping, newspapers, monthly magazine subscriptions, and Standard Mail (A) direct mail.
The cost associated with moving mail from the sender to the recipient is related primarily to the manual effort involved. The mail must go through several sorting processes and eventually be sorted down to the carrier delivering the mail. Once the mail is sorted down to the actual mail carrier, the carrier must manually sort the mail into the sequence that matches the route that he/she walks or drives. This is a very expensive, labor-intensive process. Carriers spend approximately fifty percent (50%) of their time manually sorting mail.
The USPS has spent billions of dollars to automate this process. The intent of automation is to process the mail faster while minimizing costs. To minimize costs, automated equipment has been manufactured and data processing methods have been implemented. The data processing methods were created so that the mailers themselves could perform certain tasks that would make it easier for the USPS to process the mail. The USPS passes the labor savings on to any mailer who shares in the work in the form of postage discounts. This is known as “work sharing.” There are a number of tasks that a mailer can perform to obtain work sharing discounts. The more work the mailer performs, the greater the discounts.
The oldest work sharing program is carrier route sorting. Mailers match their name and address mailing file to the USPS postal data and assign carrier route codes. Every ZIP code and/or city is broken up into carrier routes. Each route represents one mail carrier. The USPS assigns each carrier a carrier number. This number is the carrier route code.
The Domestic Mail Manual (DMM) published by the United States Postal Service describes various methods for presorting to accommodate the different classes and mail piece characteristics. In particular, a discount is available for mailing Periodicals and Standard Mail (A) if the mail is properly prepared and entered by the mailer at an eligible USPS entry postal facility that serves the delivery address on the mail. This discount category is referred to as Destination Delivery Unit (DDU) rate or discounting.
In order to take advantage of DDU discounts, the mailer must determine the eligible USPS entry postal facilities and their ZIP codes and identify all the local ZIP codes of the delivery addresses being served by each eligible USPS entry postal facility. When mailing, the mailer must code in the three-digit ZIP code prefix or the five-digit code for the entry postal facility, and then code in a parameter to specifying all the local ZIP codes that are served by the entry postal facility and eligible for the DDU rate. For example, for the eligible entry postal facility at Aurora, Ill., the five-digit code is 60506, while the three-digit ZIP code prefix is 605.
The USPS Address Information System presently puts out a number of products to help mailers who wish to take advantage of DDU discounts. The products relevant for DDU discounts are the USPS Drop Ship Address File and the USPS Drop Ship ZIP Carrier Route File, which are part of the USPS Drop Ship Product. The USPS Drop Ship Address File contains the USPS facility address and telephone information, and a drop site key for linking the entry postal facility address to the ZIP code of the delivery address. The USPS Drop Ship ZIP Carrier Route File contains ZIP codes, carrier routes and other discount codes. It also contains a drop site letter key and a drop site other key or additional discounts. The keys are pointers for connecting the USPS Drop Ship Address File to the USPS Drop Ship ZIP Carrier Route File.
Identifying all the local ZIP codes for an entry point that are eligible for the DDU rate and manually coding in the parameter to identify these ZIP codes is time-consuming and subject to errors. Furthermore, the USPS updates the Drop Ship Address File and the Drop Ship ZIP Carrier Route File monthly. In order to incorporate the ZIP code changes to comply with USPS monthly updates, the mailer has to verify the list of ZIP codes associated with each eligible entry point every time the mailer runs the mailing.
It is advantageous and desirable to provide a method of providing postal discounting to a mailer in accordance with the DDU discounts without requiring the mailer to look up and verify the local ZIP codes for all the relevant eligible entry points and code the required parameters to specify the local ZIP codes.